Camera Salvage Pro is device and file system independent, which means that the user can recover files from a normal Mac OS hard drive, USB key, PC disk, Linux disk, FAT32 disk, FLASH card, Digital Camera, iPod (non-iOS based), or almost any other media or file system that can be recognized in Mac OS X.

Quick Tip: Chance of Recovery

Camera Salvage Pro cannot recover deleted files that have been overwritten by new data. Having said this, due to the way in which data is distributed across file systems when being copied, there is often a decent chance that recently deleted files have not yet been overwritten, though there are no guarantees. Camera Salvage Pro is designed to recover files not repair them.

Camera Salvage Pro can currently recover over 20 file types, embedded and standalone (see Appendix B). It will recover both computer files and RAW camera files, as it works on digital camera memory cards. In addition, Camera Salvage Pro is constantly being enhanced and updated with an increasing number of file types it can recover. For the most current list of salvageable file types, please visit our web site at: https://www.subrosasoft.com/ or email us at support@SubRosaSoft.com.

Even with its advanced features and performance, Camera Salvage Pro is extremely straightforward to handle. The easy-to-use interface is designed with any level of OS X user in mind and is highly accessible to all, requiring only a few clicks to complete the whole recovery process.

1: Camera Salvage Pro Features

Written specifically for Mac OS X, Camera Salvage Pro includes powerful features that give the user greater control and flexibility in analyzing and retrieving lost data:

Works anywhere – Camera Salvage Pro is device and file system independent. This means that the user can recover files from a hard drive, digital camera, USB key, PC disk, FLASH card, and most storage media that work with the Mac.

Searches free space – On HFS+ volumes, the user can limit Camera Salvage Pro to scan and recover files from only the free space of a volume without reading new files you can still access. This greatly increases the speed at which the program recovers your files.

Recovers files after a disk or device has been formatted – Own an initialized disk or other device with files that you want back? No problem! So long as the drive was not securely initialized or extensively reused, Camera Salvage Pro should be able to recover most pictures and videos deleted from storage media.

Quick Tip: Secure Erase

Camera Salvage Pro cannot recover data from devices or media that have been securely erased, a process that overwrites the media’s data one or more times. Most operating systems only perform a “quick format” by default, which erases only index files, and so unless the user consciously performs a secure initialization, the chances of recovery are high.

Recovers files from corrupt media – Data corruption does not stop Camera Salvage Pro from working. In fact, it will happily process an entire corrupted file system for intact data, and recover whole or partial files wherever it finds them.

Camera Salvage Pro works on faulty hardware – Camera Salvage Pro can also recover data from mechanically unsound devices. In addition to several tried and tested methods, SubRosaSoft has implemented additional improvements to read the same piece of information and to automatically skip of areas of the file system that are fully unreadable. By employing these methods, Camera Salvage Pro is able to recover data from sources that to other software may have appeared to be unusable.

Preview – Allows the user to preview a range of available files before choosing to recover them. Using the underlying architecture of Mac OS X, Camera Salvage Pro can read and display audio, video, image, text and other files.

Simple interface – Camera Salvage Pro has a clean and simple user interface that makes it accessible and very easy to use, whether you are a beginner or an advanced user.

Contacting SubRosaSoft, Inc.

Comments & Questions
If you have comments, problems, or questions about this product, or if you are interested in purchasing a site license, please contact us via email: info@subrosasoft.com. For information regarding technical help, please refer to “Finding Help…” at the end of Chapter 2.

2: Getting Started – The Basics of Camera Salvage Pro

System Requirements

Camera Salvage Pro is designed to run on Macs with the following minimum specifications:

Apple Power Macintosh CPU (Intel based)

Mac OS X (10.7 or higher)

At least 2 GB of RAM

Secondary Hard Disk

Registration Number

Each user is required to have a registration number, otherwise known as a serial number, in order to complete installation of the software.

Online Purchase

When purchasing the software online at: https://www.subrosasoft.com/ the registration number is automatically emailed as part of the purchase confirmation. If a confirmation email is not received, please check that it has not mistakenly been placed in the email client’s junk folder before requesting technical support. Please print this confirmation email, and store it in a safe and secure place for future reference.

Retail Purchase

If the software was purchased through a retail channel, the registration number should be inside the tin case on top of the CD. Please be sure to keep these details in a safe and secure place.

No Registration Number – Trial Mode

Without a registration number, Camera Salvage Pro runs with limited functionality. In Trial Mode, the user will be able to scan for files, but will be unable to recover them. For full recovery, the user must register his or her version of Camera Salvage Pro. To do this, purchase the software online from www.subrosasoft.com or via a retail channel, then simply select “Enter License Key” from the Camera Salvage Pro drop menu, and enter a valid registration number. An alternative way to register the product is to click on the serial number link on your serial number email.

Updates and Upgrades

A single registration number is valid for incremental updates to the purchased version of Camera Salvage Pro. When upgrading between versions the purchase of a new registration number will be required. For information on upgrades, please email sales@subrosasoft.com.

Lost Registration Numbers

Please ensure that you keep your registration number in a safe and secure place. Print out confirmation emails, or back them up. SubRosaSoft cannot guarantee the re-issue of serial numbers for our software.

Site Licenses

Obtaining the Latest Version

Downloading from the Web Site

It is important to have the latest version of the Camera Salvage Pro software. The latest version is always freely available for download on our web site at: https://www.subrosasoft.com/

A download link, alongside version information, is accessible on the product page of the site. Simply click the link; a compressed archive file will automatically begin to download to the desktop, or another specified download location.

Camera Salvage Pro versions are distributed in a DMG format, and can be mounted on the Desktop in the Mac OS Finder by simply double-clicking the file icon. Within the disk image the user will find the Camera Salvage Pro application, the latest Read Me document, and a quick start guide.

Installing or Updating via Download

Once the software has been downloaded from the site and decompressed, the user should simply drag Camera Salvage Pro from the mounted disk image into the Applications folder. If prompted to replace an existing version of the file, click Replace. When updating to the latest version, the user may be prompted with an install dialog window after application start-up. If so, click the Install button and proceed as usual.

We strongly recommend the Camera Salvage Pro application be moved to the Applications folder.

Initial Setup

The first time you run the program, your Mac will ask for an administrator password. Once authenticated, the software will be ready for scanning and recovery of files.

Quick Tip: Password for Authentication Process

The password is your administrator password, and not one assigned by us. If you don’t have a password, you will need to assign one to the system before using Camera Salvage Pro.

Finding Help & Technical Support

Should the user need assistance while working with Camera Salvage Pro there are a number of sources for help:

Help within Camera Salvage Pro

To get help with any questions you may have about the operation of Camera Salvage Pro, select ‘Camera Salvage Pro Help’ from the drop-down Help menu.

Technical Support

Our technical support is free via email and can be accessed at the following address: support@subrosasoft.com. The support hours are 10am to 6pm Pacific Standard Time Monday through Friday (GMT -8).

In addition to any support question(s), the user must include ALL of the following pieces of information:

Valid registration number.

System configuration(s) – hard drive make, model etc.

System OS version.

System related information can be found by using the “System Profiler” application in the /Applications/Utilities folder.

3: Using Camera Salvage Pro – Understanding the Core Functions

The Main Window – An Overview

Immediately after start-up, the user will be taken to the ‘Main Window’. The Main Window is the starting point for performing any task.

Menu Items

There are a few items on the menu bar that are specific for Camera Salvage Pro:

Enter License Key…

Selecting Enter License Key… will display a window for entering the Registration number (if the software is running in Trial mode). The menu will be disabled if a serial number has already been entered

Camera Salvage Pro Help

Selecting Camera Salvage Pro Help will launch the default browser on the user’s machine and access SubRosaSoft.com for Camera Salvage Pro’s html-based help file

The Main Window’s Layout

The layout of the window is effectively divided into 4 sections:

The Source pane.

The Scan Options panel.

The Found pane.

The Preview pane.

Source pane

This part of the window contains the devices and volumes attached to the machine.

From this panel, a user can select a device or a volume to scan and recover files.

Scan Options + Buttons panel

This part of the window that contains the scan options. When performing a drive scan, the user has 2 settings to consider:

Deleted files only or Entire device

Speed of scan

Search for deleted files only – In order to speed up the process of scanning a device for recoverable files, the user can search through only unallocated blocks of data containing erased files.

Search for regular and deleted files will search for all files, deleted or not.

Found pane

This part of the window is where the initial scan results will appear once the user has completed the initial scan. The results are displayed in the pane, grouped by file types, making it easier to salvage specific kinds of files.

To select a file or multiple files to recover, simply scroll up or down the list, and highlight the file with a Mouse Click, or Command + Mouse Click Item to select multiple files. To include all files found, simply select all of them by entering Command + ‘a’.

Once you have selected the file(s) for recovery, you can proceed to recovery the by clicking Recover.

Preview pane

This part of the window allows the user to preview a range of different file types simply by selecting files in the Found pane.

To select a file to preview, simply scroll and locate the item of interest from the list, and click on the file. Seconds later, a preview of the file will be displayed.

Quick Tip: Limitation of Preview Pane

For safety reasons, Camera Salvage Pro will not allow the preview of files bigger than 30 MB.

The Recovery Process

The recovery process is a simple 2-step procedure:

Gather a list of available files

Recover the files to a location of your choice

Step one of the process is easy enough to understand, with Camera Salvage Pro simply gathering a list of available data.
However, in the second step, it is important to understand that when a user is recovering data from a device or volume, he or she should NOT save the recovered data back to the same location.

Why? The answer is simple enough, but does not necessarily occur to a lot of people. To the computer, deleted files are considered “free space”, and so the files you’re attempting to recover may be overwritten while saving. The system has no way to know it’s overwriting files you want to salvage. Therefore, when the user is recovering files he or she could easily overwrite the very blocks of data that contain data marked for recovery.

What’s the solution to this? Either use another partition on the same device, or attach a secondary device such as an external USB hard drive to write the recovered files to. When recovering files the user must also be sure to have an equal amount of free space to recover to, running out of space will cause an error message and halt the recovery process, thus forcing the user to start the process all over.

That said, SubRosaSoft understands not everyone has a second drive handy. In an emergency situation, Camera Salvage Pro version 9 allows the user to recover the data back to the same drive it is recovering from. The user will receive an alert warning the consequence of writing data to the drive Camera Salvage Pro is trying to recover from.

Quick Tip: Space is King

When attempting to recover any number of files, the user should always be certain that he or she has enough available recovery space. Attempting to recover a file such as a 300MB video file will require the exact same amount of space (and sometimes more) on the recovery device.

Selecting volume or device to scan and recover files

To select a device or a volume to scan and recover files, simply scroll up or down the Source pane, and highlight the device or volume

Once you have selected the device or volume to scan for files, you can proceed to the next step of selecting the scan options.

Selecting scan options

The user has 2 settings to consider:

Search for deleted files only

Search for all (deleted of regular) files

Search for deleted files or Search for deleted of regular files – The user can search through only ‘unallocated’ blocks of data (or free space) containing deleted files, or the entire device for all files, deleted or not.

Scanning for Files to Recover

Having selected the file types for scanning, the user is now ready to proceed with the file-gathering step of the salvage process. To get the scan started, the user should simply click the Start Scan button on the bottom left-hand corner of the main window. A progress bar will appear at the bottom of the window, providing the user with live statistics regarding the number of files and any bad blocks found.

To help speed up the scan procedure, the user should make sure that the ‘Scan for deleted files only’ option is checked. This will force Camera Salvage Pro to only scan portions of the drive that have not been allocated within the file catalog.

When completed the user will be presented with a dialog box confirming the completion of the scanning process with the final statistics of the number of files located and the number of bad blocks. He or she should close this by clicking on OK, at which point the user can review the results of the scan in the ‘Found’ pane of the window. To the right of each file type in the result set is a disclosure triangle, when clicked this will display an expanded list of files available for preview and salvage.

Previewing Scan Results

Having generated a set of results, preview a range of different file types simply by selecting the respective file in the results pane and then viewing matches in the preview window.

Recovering Files

Having scanned, reviewed, and previewed the available data, select and salvage the desired files, one by one. To do so, he or she must select each individual line item in the results pane.

Rather than scan and recover files on an individual basis, select multiple files, either using the Command + A to “Select All” items or using Command + Mouse Click Item to select items randomly and selectively.

Once selected, click the Recover button at the bottom of the results pane. This will return a “Save” dialog box in which you can select an external location to save the data. Click Save to begin recovery.

Once the files are salvaged, a dialog will pop up to announce the process is completed. Click OK to continue, or click Show in Finder to display the recovered files.

If you selected Show in Finder, a folder with the recovered files will open.

Quick Tip: Recovery Location

To be certain that the recovery of files does not overwrite the potential data source, Camera Salvage Pro alerts you to save ALL recovered data to a completely separate media source. This ensures you do not overwrite data available for recovery.

4: Appendices

A – Question and Answers

Where is the documentation for Camera Salvage Pro?

You are reading it now. If you need help while you are using the software, you can access the help file from the Help menu.

I need more support, what should I do?

Our technical support is free and can be accessed by e-mail (Our e-mail support hours are 10 am to 6 pm Monday through Friday, California time.) You must include in the e-mail your serial number, system configurations, and the system software version.

I don’t have a password for my system. Can I still install the software?

No. Without the password (or if the password is “blank”), Camera Salvage Pro will not be able to initialize key components to start the scan for lost files.

The file names will not be included as they are not actually stored in the file but rather in the system’s catalog/b-trees. Minutes after a file is deleted, that information is removed and the space recycled and overwritten. Camera Salvage Pro will recover your files to the folder of your choice, but the specific folders they were in and placement will not be the same because again this information is contained in the system’s catalog/b-trees.

My drive doesn’t show up under Camera Salvage Pro, what can I do to get Camera Salvage Pro to recognize the drive?

It could be possible that your drive is malfunctioning to the point where your computer is not able to talk to it at all, in which case even the device name will not appear. You might try the following things: double-check the drive cables and power source; unplug and re-attach the drive, or power down and restart both your drive and your computer.

If the device still fails to show up, you could, as a last resort, try putting the drive into an external enclosure and see if the computer will detect it.

My camera card won’t show up, is the card defective?

Sometimes the flash card from your camera will not appear on the desktop or in Camera Salvage Pro. If this is the case, you may need to connect the media card via a media card reader. Although a lot of cameras (like the Canon SD series and the Nikon COOLPIX) can be connected to your Mac via USB cable to download your pictures, there are sometimes issues that prevent a damaged camera memory card from being recognized by your Mac. Using a USB memory card reader often solves this problem, and allows the card to be read by your Mac so that you may recover your pictures from the damaged card using Camera Salvage Pro. Media card readers can be purchased from most computer electronics stores (for under $20), and most read and write to a large number of supported card formats.

How come some files cannot be recovered properly?

Usually the bigger the file, the tougher for Camera Salvage Pro to recover. Larger files may be fragmented. (Fragmentation occurs when the operating system breaks the file into pieces as it writes the data over the media). This is especially true when the media is getting filled up. It will have lots of small open spaces, but few large ones. The operating system has to split up the file to fit into the open spaces.

Can Camera Salvage Pro work on the same disk as the boot drive?

Yes, you can run Camera Salvage Pro on any locally connected device. However, the destination folder to recover the files to should not be on the same volume you trying to recover the files from. While Camera Salvage Pro 9 permits saving recovered files to the same device it is working to recover, please do so only in emergency situations (e.g. when a second disk is unavailable.)

Camera Salvage Pro cannot see my iPod, iTunes can. What is wrong?

In order for Camera Salvage Pro to detect the iPod, the iPod will need to have Disk Use enabled. For information on how to enable disk use on your iPod please refer to this page “Using your iPod as a storage drive.” Camera Salvage Pro does not support iOS based iPods, iPhones, and iPads.

B – Recovery File Types List

The following is a list of file formats that can be recovered using SubRosaSoft’s Camera Salvage Pro version 9.1:

3GPP video file

3GPP2 video file

Adobe RAW DNG

AIFF sound

ASF movie

AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) movie

Canon CR2

Canon CRW

Capture One IIQ

Digital Video & iMovie Movies

DS2 sound

Fuji RAF

JPEG

Kodak DCR

Leica DNG

Leica RAW

Lossless Audio FLAC

MP4 video

m4v video

MIDI sound

MKV

MP3

mp4 video

mpeg media

Minolta Dimage MRW

MTS media

Nikon NEF

Panasonic RAW

Pentax RAW

Olympus ORF

QuickTime Media

Samsung SRW

SONY ARW

TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)

WAV sound

WEBM Media

WMA audio

WMV video

C – Copyright, EULA and Trademarks

Copyright Notice

SubRosaSoft.com Inc copyrights this software, the product design, and design concepts with all rights reserved. Your rights with regard to the software and manual are subject to the restrictions and limitations imposed by the copyright laws of the United States of America.

Under the copyright laws, neither the programs nor the manual may be copied, reproduced, translated, transmitted or reduced to any printed or electronic medium or to any machine-readable form, in whole or in part, without the written consent of SubRosaSoft.com Inc.